On Wednesday, if all goes as planned, President Barack Obama will sign the financial-reform bill crafted by Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts, sponsored by the Democratic Party in both houses, and supported by three Republican Senators – Scott Brown of Massachusetts and Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine. When the bill is signed, we will be told, as we have repeatedly been told in the last few months, that the measures included within it will prevent future financial crises of the sort that we have suffered from over the last two years.

By now, of course, most Americans have become skeptical of such claims. We were to told that the so-called “stimulus” bill would bring unemployment down, and we learned that its main function was to reward constituencies favoring the party in power. It increased dramatically the salaries of those within the federal civil service, it expanded that civil service massively, and it enabled the state governments and the localities to continue to pay those who worked within the public sector at those levels. Similar lies were told during the healthcare debate. We were told that no one would lose his coverage, that no one would be forced to acquire health insurance, that the cost curve would be bent downward. It is proper to ask whether we are being lied to now and whether Senators Brown, Collins, and Snowe have sold us down the river.

The answer depends – to a considerable degree – on what were the causes of the recent financial crisis. Was it caused by a market failure? If so, is it likely that governmental regulation will prevent such failures in the future? These are the claims advanced by Paul Krugman and the like; these are the claims put forward by President Obama, Senator Dodd, and Congressman Frank. And, on the face of it, they would appear to be true. There was, after all, a bubble in the real estate market. Goldman Sachs and the like marketed junk bonds, made up of mortgages, on a gigantic scale and managed to get for them a triple-A rating from S&P and from Moody’s, and insurance against default was purchased from outfits like AIG that had no idea of the risks involved. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve could and should have intervened.

But one must be cautious about calling what happened “a case of market failure,” for the real-estate market was not a free market. One could, of course, reply that no market is a genuinely free market. The “free market” is an ideal type. It does not exist in reality. The government interferes and gives shape to virtually every market through taxation, regulation, and laws detailing how contracts are to be enforced.

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Just came across some rather grim analysis of the economic impact of massive, ongoing federal budget deficits from a group of prominent economists. It’s a little dated (2004) but still highly relevant considering that the deficit situation has dramatically worsened since then. Some highlights:

Substantial ongoing deficits may severely and adversely affect expectations and confidence, which in turn can generate a self-reinforcing negative cycle among the underlying fiscal deficit, financial markets, and the real economy:

• As traders, investors, and creditors become increasingly concerned that the government would resort to high inflation to reduce the real value of government debt or that a fiscal deadlock with unpredictable consequences would arise, investor confidence may be severely undermined;
• The fiscal and current account imbalances may also cause a loss of confidence among participants in foreign exchange markets and in international credit markets, as participants in those markets become alarmed not only by the ongoing budget deficits but also by related large current account deficits;
• The loss of investor and creditor confidence, both at home and abroad, may cause investors and creditors to reallocate funds away from dollar-based investments, causing a depreciation of the exchange rate, and to demand sharply higher interest rates on U.S. government debt;

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Today, Politio reported the the Congressional Democrat Leadership will increase the debt ceiling by $1.8 trillion. There was a time, in Democrat land, that Robert Rubin was thought to be an oracle. During the Clinton years, the Treasury Secretary was so highly regarded that his economic plans were dubbed Rubinomics.

Mr. Rubin, you see, despised long term deficit spending because he believed that it led to higher interest rates over time and therefore a bad economy.  It did so, in his view, because deficit spending required excessive government borrowing which adversely competed with and reduced private borrowing which, in turn, led to higher interest rates and “crowded out” private borrowing and investment.

Beyond that, according to Rubin: “ongoing deficits may severely and adversely affect expectations and confidence, which in turn can generate a self-reinforcing cycle among the underlying fiscal deficit, financial markets, and the real economy.”  On the other hand, by eliminating deficits, the economy will improve because of lower interest rates, increased confidence and investment.

Following his lead, the Democrats raised tax rates which (a) led to the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 because they all stood against tax increases, and (b) led to the highest tax burden in US history, and therefore (c) led to the recession of 1999 – which ultimately led to (d) lower revenues.

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I participated in listen-only mode in the teleconference call Monday in which ACORN’s allegedly independent “audit” was released.

I regret it was difficult to make out what the players were saying.

That’s because as the left ferociously circled the wagons, all the creaking wheel noises in the background drowned out much of what was said.

Scott Harshbarger, ACORN ally and former attorney general of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts

One the main points that ACORN ally and former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger and ACORN CEO/chief organizer Bertha Lewis were trying to make was that ACORN, i.e. the lead entity that controls the ACORN network, and ACORN Housing, are separate entities.

Because ACORN Housing and ACORN are different organizations neither is responsible for the other, they argued. In other words, ACORN is not responsible for ACORN Housing employees caught on video encouraging illegal behavior, and vice versa, they reasoned.

Harshbarger said on the conference call

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For anyone who thinks that big Wall Street and Big Government aren’t joined at the hip, promoting policies and laws that keep each other fat and happy often at the expense of the American taxpayer, consider the career of Robert Rubin.

Rubin, of course, is largely gone from the public scene after spending 10 disastrous years as a board member and senior executive at Citigroup, the banking giant that epitomizes all that is wrong with American finance, and before that, a largely successful run as Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Administration, which he joined after running another controversial bank, Goldman Sachs. But his legacy looms large, mainly because I believe he was one of the reasons why the financial crisis occurred in the first place.

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